John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog, page 2

The trouble with football

Just after the first of the year, an NFL player named Damar Hamlin literally died on the field—he had a cardiac arrest as a result of a blow to the chest—and was resuscitated. That was still in the back of my mind when I noticed among my PDFs a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about football. I had saved it but for more than 10 years avoided it, fearing it would tell me something I didn’t want to know. I was right. It’s profoundly disturbing.

American football isn’t played everywher...

Looking backward: A 2015 view of the Wright brothers and Elon Musk

(Photo illustration by me, from two public-domain Wikimedia images.)

A September 2015 London Review of Books account of two biographies, which was linked in a recent LRB email, and which I finished reading yesterday, is illuminating and a little surprising. It addresses a book by David McCullough about Wilbur and Orville Wright and one by Ashlee Vance about Elon Musk. Both books had been published in England in May 2015, but that coincidence isn’t the reason John Lanchester and the LRB ch...

A photo and a “photo”

Taken through the window of Nacho Macho Taco, with a little help from Photoshop Camera’s Artful lens. Created by the Stable Diffusion 2.0 text-to-image generator provided by Baseten, with the prompt “A large spaceship, capable of carrying many passengers, with a shape resembling a giant bagel.”

Ah, computers: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. These images don’t show either of those extremes, but they do show how helpful the darned things can be. (That I can’t fix a cou...

Going out at night

Skateboarders using the empty pool around the Unisphere. I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to stop for a steady shot.

Why should you go to a park at night? Because you might find something like this. Most of the time, after dark, the Unisphere sits all alone in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park. But sometimes it has company. One night in November 2006, I saw this scene and caught it with a nifty little camera, the Contax i4R.

On another November night, I photographed the Eiffel Tower, t...

From the cutting room floor: further thoughts about human and machine writing

Nothing new under the sun: This machine, built in the 18th century, can write. It’s one of the Jaquet-Droz automata. (Photo by Rama. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 France.)

One of my reactions to pandemic-induced isolation, fretfulness, and so forth has been to get up during the night, read things online, and jot notes about what I’m reading. One outcome of my nighttime reading was that I proposed to FastCompany.com an essay about computers that write, which was published last week. You can find...

Morning thoughts on smartphones, tech firms, and space

“Yes, hello. Aliens? How may I direct your call?” (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

The other day, I was looking through old emails on my computer and somehow ended up in the year 2011. Yes, that could be the beginning of a time-travel story, but not here, not now. One message I saw introduced a product from Apple: an iPhone 4 in white.

A few days later, hoping to learn about a new phone, I sat down at my Apple laptop to watch a ...

The virus is still here, but some of our defenses aren’t

What’s wrong with this picture? Taken in Eataly, Flatiron District, New York, 7/28/22. (Image: John E. Branch Jr.)

In Romeo and Juliet, neither a rapier nor a rapier wit is enough to protect Mercutio when a fight erupts between partisans of the Montagues and the Capulets in the streets of Verona. Fighting in public has been forbidden; nonetheless, in what he just called “these hot days,” Mercutio and Tybalt clash for a moment before being separated, and Mercutio takes a hit.

You’ve probabl...

Passing glances: On niceties of language, on courage

When I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport on my first visit to France, I had a question, and after finding an airport worker, I blurted it out directly, with no preliminaries. She tactfully informed me that when you address someone in France, common courtesy calls for you to begin with “Bonjour!” or something of the kind. Writing isn’t the same as talking, nor am I in France (though you may be). Still, it’s a nice idea. So…

Good morning! (It’s morning where I am—that is, when I am.) Or good...

Oran is our town: Experiencing Camus’s ‘Plague’ during our own

[image error]Many people who are reading this novel for the first time at the present moment, with a new kind of plague sweeping the world, are surprised by how well Albert Camuss 1947 work reflects our experience. I was. But a little reflection showed me another angle on it. If you can look for differences between thingsbetween the present and the past, for instanceyou can also look for similarities, and those arent hard to discover in this case. Maybe, in fact, we should expect to find that others have...

A note on the lack of comparisons for the pandemic

From Casualties, the print-magazine title for a review by Peter Schjeldahl in the 12/02/19 New Yorker of a PS1 art exhibition called Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 19912011:

When will we stop obsessing about our gimmickry of communication and just communicate as best we can? Inexplicably, to me, the shows catalogue features a reprint of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillards flashy, repellently foolish essay of 1991, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which sashays past the actuality...